


WHAT THEY WOULD HAVE BELIEVED

by jonphaedrus



Series: TO CONQUER OR DIE [1]
Category: Assassin's Creed - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Disabled Character, Canon Rewrite, Canon-Typical Violence, Historical Accuracy, M/M, Other Ships Not Mentioned in Tags, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Screen Reader Friendly, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-19
Updated: 2021-03-19
Packaged: 2021-03-28 17:49:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30143304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jonphaedrus/pseuds/jonphaedrus
Summary: On the evening of 5 March 1770, the night where I first met my son, I wagered the fates of unborn millions against the courage of six brave men who had unknowingly been chosen to die, and severed for good those ties of Blood and Bond which had heretofore held Rite to Rite and Colony to King, and planted by force in the breast of America the gunpowder she would need to light the fuse of Freedom.—————Historians relate, not so much what is done, as what they would have believed.
Relationships: Haytham Kenway/Charles Lee (1732-1782)
Series: TO CONQUER OR DIE [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1329864
Comments: 4
Kudos: 5





	1. EPIGRAPH

PROLOGUE:

HISTORIANS RELATE, NOT SO MUCH WHAT IS DONE,  
AS **WHAT THEY WOULD HAVE BELIEVED.**

( _POOR RICHARD’S ALMANAC, 1739_ )

* * *

The time is now near at hand which must probably determine whether Americans are to be freemen or slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their houses and farms are to be pillaged and destroyed, and themselves consigned to a state of wretchedness from which no human efforts will deliver them. The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of this army. Our cruel and unrelenting enemy leaves us only the choice of brave resistance, or the most abject submission. We have, therefore, to resolve **_to conquer or die_** _ **.**_

\- General George Washington, in his address to the Continental Army given before the Battle of Long Island, 27 August 1776

* * *


	2. and then you will run to the devil himself from the sight of a gun

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Father, forgive me, for I know what I do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [the castle island song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6OfBrbRYuw) first appeared after the Boston Massacre, described in its broadside publication as ["a new song much in vogue among the friends to arbitary power, and the soldiery at Castle Island, where it was composed, since the troops have evacuated the town of Boston.](https://www.americanrevolution.org/war_songs/warsongs10.php)

> _letter, dated 19 March 1770_

Dearest Jenny,

I have had this paper set upon my desk now a fortnight and have, as I am sure you note from the numerous inkstains prior to my writing here, aborted my attempts to start this letter no less than four times. I find that Words, which upon a day are normally my Forte whatsoever the language, come to me now stifled and stilted and seem to turn to Dust as soon as I place them upon my tongue or the page.

No doubt you have already received the news of 5 March. You know my Heart of Hearts better than any the world over: I do not need to place before you my Blame in the matter for you to know it is my hands that have been stained with that Damned Spot. I am certain that it left Boston harbor upon the same night; I have Certainty that when my own letter arrives, you shall have already spent some many days Assured of my hand in the matter. It is exceedingly not my intention to place before you my heart and beg _Forgiveness_ —indeed; should I do so, I would expect nothing less than approbation. Nay. Instead, I am drawn to excuse myself to you, for however little Good it shall us both do.

Your Forgiveness in this matter I could not beg were I to accompany my request with all the jewels and gold in the world. I am Certain of this; I cannot in such a manner beg even my own allowance for these Unspeakable Acts. Five innocents, souls unsullied by thoughts of blood, lay dead in the streets of Boston upon my Command, and I have in their offering emboldened the sacrifice of a Hundred, a Thousand, more—almost all, it pains me to admit, too young to even have a Penelope to wait and weave for them in vain.

By God, Jenny! How can I in Conscience separate that heinous burden of Legacy from the duty of Commitment? I feel _his_ soul upon me as if I am once more upon the gallows and his demands a Noose: I shall fall as did our father and countless others should I remain with my soul rent in twain by the hand Fate has dealt me. I should ask you _what am I to do?_ were it not that I know there is Nothing that I can do; I have brought upon my head the brimstone and fire of the LORD and I shudder upon myself to think what shall be Adjudged my tally of sins, jealousies &c when Providence finds it mete to place me against my fellows &cry my injuries free to the annals of Mankind.

You would hold it as but that which is my Due, and I should find myself a malefactor of the greatest of mendacities were I to bristle and buck beneath the yoke you would place atop me. It does a man no holy Good to deny that for which he must be so Rightly Blamed.

_Nay_ sister dear: your Clemency must go underserved, for if my own, which stands poised before not even a fraction of your own capacity for quarter, cannot Conscience it, then you must hold me to the bar same as any other criminal. Were it I knew that this Business would end in any way other than the bloodletting of brothers and I could find at least some succor in the sundering of the armies of the enemies, but it is not to be so. Brother shall strike Crother, and before this business is done, the hills of New England shall run wet with blood. I have now thrown the lots, Jenny, and all that awaits I and those souls who have joined with me to open with gunfire is but fifty cubits. Do not think the irony of my tri-corn hath escap’d me.

All that remains me is the hope—however unfounded—that mayhaps another path lays before us, but to my horror all that I can see is the interminable Thicket of _War_ , and all that which must be borne with it. I can only pray that you will find it in yourself to allow me this one last Trespass, albeit being it one that shall perhaps never end.

As always and ever your Health and Servant,

— H.

> _5 March, 1770 – Pokonoket Wôpanâak and Massachusett territory, ceded in the[1693 Treaty of Portsmouth](http://kstrom.net/isk/maps/maritimes1693.html) and the [1725 Treaty of Boston](http://kstrom.net/isk/maps/novascotiatreaties.html) | so-called Boston, Province of Massachusetts Bay  
> _

I did not sleep the night that I condemned the souls of innocents for no crime but their unfettered longing for the loosing of the chains of liberty. At best I was placing them into the embrace of a merciful God, and at worst, Nothing, no hellfire or torment and endless unknowing afterlife.

I went to bed with Charles, as was only polite for his own needs before my own, and I lay awake some long time in the dark beside him, listening to his breath, deep and still with sleep, my hand atop his side to feel the even pace of his breath. It was only when I could remain no longer untethered in the darkness, alone and adrift in a sea of nothing but my own thoughts and troubles—I knew I was not even perchance to sleep that night, no matter how I may have tried—that I finally rose, sliding out the open side of the bed where I habitually slept.

Charles did not even stir.

He was, as I was, a creature of long habit. It was rare indeed that I would sleep a full night beside any other, no matter the affection which I harbored for them. Work pulled me from my slumbers, aye, but more often than that it was the weight of duty and my own ill-settled heart, sick as I always was for the want of an easy answer that absolved me of the blood that soaked my hands.

Blood that would be soon trebled in its stain.

I moved about the Green Dragon room I had spent so many nights in the past fifteen years, comfortable in my knowledge of it in the dark, and took the striker to light the taper I had left on the desk after I had blown it out to go to bed not two tolls of the hour prior. The wick took quick enough, the beeswax still somewhat warm, and the low glow of the candle flickered as the light filled the small room Charles and I were sharing as we bedded down for the night.

In the bed, he turned away, rolling to face the wall, tugging the blankets up toward his ears, and I found myself smiling in indulgence at his irascibility even in the gentle repose of sleep. Rare it was to see him truly relaxed, and he never seemed so even when he lay dormant in the deepest of dreams. Charles was not a man given to stillness, not in any form.

Turning from him and back to the desk, I pulled the chair over and moved the light aside, out of my way, before I placed my spectacles upon my nose and sorted through my correspondence. We were only in Boston for but a handful of days, after Benjamin had made it clear in his last correspondence that the time had come ripe and enough blood had been spilled to loose the floodgates—as long as it would take to strike flint to tinder and watch as merry flames took the dry kindling of Boston’s burgeoning calls for Liberty and turned them into an inferno, too great to be stopped by anything but a bloodletting that this continent had not yet seen, even in its so-short and terrible history.

I had received a letter from Shay not five days past, delivered to me in New York, and I had brought it with me on this outing, known I needed to save it when there was such a cloud blotting the horizon. Rarely did such letters contain anything like fine news, or even news at all, but I missed him with a palpable weight in my chest and even just the sight of his hand brought me a peace I rarely possessed, and I took it free of the sealed envelope, unfolded it and held it to the light.

It was not a missive of any consequence. He had run to ground a handful of leads and gained nothing from them, found new roads that could perhaps direct him forward and would follow those. He was well, as were Christopher and his crew, and his succinct descriptions of the Templar fleet that covered nothing short of ten pages front and back revealed more than his words did how it was now a beast that spanned all the known oceans, and were far more comprehensible to me than were the official dispatches I received in my aspect as head of the Templar Navy in my seat on the Inner Council, since Shay continued to refuse the promotion. Shay knew I was no man of the ocean, and wrote to me in ways I would be able to understand. He gave descriptions of his recent adventures since I had received his last letter, a painful nine months prior when he had put properly to port in Havana for much-needed repairs to the _Morrígan,_ and replied to the many epistles he had found waiting for him from me in London when he had been in port.

He was headed now aboard the _Jackdaw_ , one of our frigates, to Pondicherry, following information he had gleaned during an incident in Madrid during the early fall. He could not promise when he would next be able to write, but if I sent East rather than West to our friends in the East India Company, he would like as not get what I wrote.

He had signed it with a faint swipe of a prick of blood atop the print of his thumb, smeared along the bottom of the page beneath his signature—my only proof that it was, indeed, him writing to me, and not another. Even after months at sea, held in letter-packets, delivered to me, and riding in my coat pocket, to my second sight his thumbprint was faintly blue.

My heart ached for him to be at my side once more. Charles was my soul, my other half, my partner in this as all things—but he was rash and impetuous, with a streak for cruelty that I did nothing to dull. Indeed, it brought out in me those worst of affectations I had tried for so terribly long to rein and yet remained undiminished. Shay was a guiding light, as steady a hand with my conscience as he was with the wheel of the _Morrígan_.

It sobered me to think what he should think of that which I must see done on the morrow. Boston was a powder keg, its wick now laid and ready to blow, and I had loaded my pistol and pointed it square at the barrel. Charles had encouraged me, always a man who understood all too well (after his youth serving with Braddock) what blood could do in a land dying of drought.

Shay had once told me we must speak and think of mercy, in all that we did.

The only man awake in the room, assured of my privacy for whatever limited and precious time I would have it, I doubled over and put my head in my hands, my elbows digging into the hard wood of the desk top. With the heels of my palms pressing into my eyes, my glasses resting against my forehead, I took a deep and shaking breath and struggled to master my emotions.

Reginald would have placed the pistol in my hand and watched me pull the trigger on the innocents myself if it meant the culmination of our desperate plans. Charles would take the fall for me if he must, lightening the burden of my heart, but he had done nothing to sway me from my decided path. Shay would have struck me with barbs as sharp as iron and steel, cut to the heart of me with the honesty of his words. Always, he was always true to himself in the dark, where I was only the sum of that which had made me—but he would still have lined up the shot in its necessity, trusting in me beyond my capacity to the last. Ziio would have turned and walked away, disgust in every line of her face and shoulders: she would have thrown away the gun.

Jenny, I knew, would have demanded I spill my own blood first, and that of the masses only after I had bled my own share for their independence, no matter if it should kill me in the course.

I did not cry. I was not gauche, nor had the years rendered me weak or inured my heart to bleeding. I knew the role I was playing—the masses cried for blood, demanding tumult in their multitude, their calls for liberty went above and beyond that which could be bought by silver and would needs be paid in the one higher price than sterling.

I could wash my hands however much I wished, before man and God, state I was innocent of the blood of these persons to the world, but the truth of the matter would stay upon my soul as tarnish for as long as I yet lived.

The blood of the innocents this coming day would be upon those who cried for it, upon them and their children undiminished as much as the Templar still bore the Mark of Cain all our terrible years later, but I was still to be the man who had given to them the Son of Man and raised the crucifix.

Father, forgive me, for I know what I do.

I did not sleep that night. If it was to be my Gethsemane, the last night before I finally took the path of no return into the future I had been promised since I had been all of ten and Reginald had placed my father’s last gift into my hands and smiled at the word _creed_ as it fell uttered unknowingly from my still-innocent lips, then I could only do the same as Christ and suffer it through in full waking. Even when the candle guttered out and there was only the light of the embers in the grate, I merely pulled my chair nearer to the coals to keep myself warm, suffering my aching joints as was my due, and remained in company with only my own thoughts even as I longed to take up the volume I had brought with me on this trip.

Although, upon second thought, what little succor could be gained from _Richard III_ would have been faint and temporary indeed. The irony of my selection, taken randomly from that atop my bedside table before we had left New York the week prior, had not struck me until that moment when I had looked at it upon my desk and realized that which I had done.

I woke Charles when my watch hands read eight, when the sun was just barely in the sky, with a touch upon his shoulder. I was already dressed, and he looked up at me, bleary-eyed with sleep. He unrolled slightly from where he had taken over the slim cot we had been meant to share, and sat up onto one elbow, his hair loose from its queue and thrown into tangles, hanging over his forehead.

It made him look younger again.

He yawned a sigh through his mustache and rubbed his hands over his face as he looked at me, searching me for something. He seemed to find it readily enough, and he frowned, his face creasing with it. “Haytham, you haven’t slept.”

“No,” I admitted. “I could not find it.” It was not so unheard of from me, but my usual six hours had dropped to four, and now, even less than that on a night. I had been lucky, the last few weeks, to make even two straight hours uninterrupted.

Charles, knowing the intimacy was allowed him, pulled me beside him on the cot, and sat the rest of the way up so I could press my face into the hollow of his shoulder. His hand stilled upon my back, hot upon my skin through the layers of my waistcoat and coat, his fingertips warm and comforting at the nape of my neck against the fine hairs there. He pressed his cheek to the top of my head, and let me stay there for a time longer than I would admit to even if pressed, taking in the scent of him—unwashed and stale sweat from our ride from New York with nothing but a basin bath with chilled water to alleviate it. And himself, yes, that most of all.

Charles smelled like Charles, and, crucially like home. Like the home I had shared with him off and on through the last fifteen years, his presence at my side my constant companion. Even when he had been across the Atlantic in London, he had always seemed like he was with me—when all else in the world could barely remain the same day to day, Charles always did. He pressed a chaste kiss to the top of my head, his mustache bristling against my hair and scalp. “Is this a second thought?” He asked, and I knew it to be meant to soothe, but he was a man who abhorred weakness, and looked for that which he could use in any space that he could use it.

He may have loved me true and with a strength of devotion that was rare to find in any other human, but Charles was still, at his heart, a man who longed for power.

“No,” I lied to him, in the way I had lied to myself for so many years. Fluently, and without hesitation. It was an art that I had practiced to fine skill. “I cannot regret that which is necessary. But I can wish it was not to be bought with innocent blood upon my orders.” I trailed off, composing my words as I thought, listening to his heartbeat through his skin, beneath only the cloth of his shirt. “It stinks to me of hypocrisy to claim that we are helping the Colonies clear the Imperial yoke, but we do it by striking down those who have no quarrel with anyone except the Crown. How many will die for this, Charles?” Not just today. Tomorrow. In the years, decades, centuries to come.

“It shan’t be on your head. It’s not your finger on the trigger.”

No. But it was I who had handed him the gun.

At least George Washington had been alone, without Gist, when he had fired the shots on Jumonville that had been the black powder for the Seven Years War. We had not masterminded it, although we had certainly fanned the embers across the Colonies and in Europe, and my becoming Grand Master of the Southern Department had only been the nail in the coffin. The war was certain, then.

Now, with the door opened for us to slide the musket through, we were actively firing what might be the first shots—or, if not the first shots of the war, then the first that would lead to the muskets being taken up by the plebeians, ready to fight for their rights and whatsoever that cost.

“Good men will die, Charles, and I find myself able to find naught but sorrow in it.”

“You are a good man, Haytham,” Charles told me, softly, his breath hot against the shell of my ear. “I fear you too-oft forget it.”

I feared I too-oft remembered it.

Later, I could remember so little of that day. Exhausted as I was from a week with little-to-no sleep, my mind in its whole fixed entirely upon what Charles had called, in what I truly hoped was jest, our _Glorious Purpose_ , upon the delicate dance between civilians, calling for blood even if they did not yet know that was to be their promised reward, between the Regulars and Captain Preston as our Knight among them, and with the Templars who surrounded the Customs House.

Sunday, and the limitation of the hostilities after the boy Seider’s death the week before, had only hardened the resolve of Boston. I had never yet met a Bostonian who would not fight man and God for that which they demanded as their due, and I did not expect to do so now.

If there was a place to strike the fuse, it was as always right here. That had never been in doubt to any of our number.

That which stuck out to me later were the smallest of things. The constant presence of Charles at the corner of my vision, crouched on the opposing Eastern rooftop, in the lee of a dormer and out of sight of those who had clambered onto similar perches to see the crowd below, his pistol primed and upraised, waiting in case a failsafe was needed, snow dusting his dark hair and the ruddy turn of his nose, stark against his mustache even beneath the hooded cloak he was wearing to blend in better with the roof slate. Preston’s latent energy, twisting in his body, as he followed that hardest of tenants of our Creed: _do so unto death—whatever the cost_. His breath, fogging in the cold evening air, as he waited, knowing that he had condemned himself and his men to what may mean the noose if the world played us for fools. And, around and beyond us, the crowd, baying for blood and so claustrophobic in its density that there was hardly but room to stand, the Custom House besieged and seeming like it would crumble before the onslaught. The whole world had narrowed down to those crowded streets, the crush of humanity within, ready and waiting for the opportunity to but present itself for all that it was begging for.

In the utter blackness of that night, without street lamps and without lit torches, beneath only the candles in windows and the sliver of the moon clear in the sky, it was all too easy to forget that there was a still a world beyond our narrow isthmus that floated in the darkness of the inexorability of an uncertain future.

And, of course, when I placed my hand on Preston’s shoulder and held it tight in my own, standing in the shade of the Custom’s House, the whirling snow against my blue coat and cloak making me not so much as but a ghost that would be forgettable, and gave the signal—“May the Father of Understanding guide you,”—I saw him for the first time, a furtive movement in my peripheral vision.

I knew him on sight. I knew him without any thought toward the content of the matter—there was never even a sliver of doubt in my heart to the identity of the boy in Native clothes on the rooftop, crouched over the body of our sniper, who stared at me with defiant eyes that seemed to glitter like chips of ice in the dark, who read to my second sight the strangest color of blue-burnished gold I had ever before seen, was any other than my son. I did not need to see his features, did not need to hear his voice, to know what he was.

Ratonhnhaké:ton. My son. He must have been—fourteen? He stood like a man older, his shoulders squared with a weight that was greater than his years. But he watched me with hunter’s eyes, stared me down in a way that was nothing but the strength of his mother, her unflinching bravery mimicked to life in his face. He did not fear me. He knew me and what I was beneath my second skin, and he challenged me in his silence to confront him, to name him what he was.

I barely had time to point him out to the Disciple with me, in uniform, before I saw Charles raise his pistol, glancing too toward the boy, unrecognizing even as I saw the truth in the blood on his hands and the body at his feet, and Charles fired into the sky.

The silence in the square, the Private on his feet and bleeding, the crowd stunned from all motion, lasted so long I believed that the strike had not lit the fuse. My breath caught in my chest.

“Damn you,” the Private yelled, his voice cracking, “Fire!”

And I let out the breath.

The ragged line before the Customs House let fire, Preston yelling ignored directions to stay the volley, while I stood in shadow, forgotten in the madness, and watched innocents drop in the Boston crowd one by one, their blood rosettes upon the mud-stained snow, and the screams began soon after, horrified, in agony, in fury.

Behind my back, I tightened the grip of one hand upon the other, and took in a deep breath of that cold Boston air, hard-edged in my nostrils. It had the same quality to it as the air on that long ago March day in 1760, when I had stood over Achilles with my sword upraised and blood dripping into my eye from the cut upon my forehead, and I had wanted so _terribly_ to see him run through.

“Conscience avaunt,” I whispered, the words blistering on my lips. “Richard’s himself again: Hark! The shrill trumpet sounds, to horse, away, my soul’s in arms, and eager for the fray.”1

On the evening of 5 March 1770, the night where I first met my son, I wagered the fates of unborn millions against the courage of six brave men who had unknowingly been chosen to die, and severed for good those ties of Blood and Bond which had heretofore held Rite to Rite and Colony to King, and planted by force in the breast of America the gunpowder she would need to light the fuse of Freedom.

> _letter, dated 23 April 1770_

Dear Brother,

I know you what you are;  
And like a sister am most loath to call  
Your faults as they are named.2

Sincerely yours,

— J. Scott

* * *

1 From Act V, Scene iii, of Colley Cibber’s 1699 adaptation of Shakespeare’s _Richard III_ into Cibber’s own modernized version for contemporary audiences, entitled _The Tragical History of King Richard III_ , which was the more popular version of the play during the of the 18th century. It’s no longer performed today, but some lines have made it back into Shakespeare’s version, just because so many audiences liked them. Haytham has probably read both versions and I feel would prefer the original, since Cibber’s is significantly bloodier and tosses a significant portion of the original script—but the quote is good.

2 King Lear, Act I, Scene I.

**Author's Note:**

> i've been sitting on this for two years and it seemed real stupid to not just....post it when the prologue is done. i fully intend to return and work more on this, probably one sequence at a time, but my brain's not in the right headspace for it rn and rather than just sit on the one other bit that's done in hopes of "oh, ill have the energy for 70k of ac3" i oughta just darn post it.
> 
> so here's a prologue.
> 
> tumblr & twitter @jonphaedrus


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